Arts & Entertainment

For any Hopkins students who have heard of the Ottobar in passing but have never bothered to find out more, here’s a quick overview. The Ottobar is a music venue for local and touring bands, as well as a bar.

On Thursday, Sept. 6 the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) held a panel called Exhibiting Black Art at the BMA and Beyond. The panel’s main point of discussion was a current exhibit called 1939: Exhibiting Black Art at the BMA about the lack of black art in museums and the hurdles in the way of exhibiting it.

When I found out that hip-hop artists Aminé and Tobi Lou would be performing on the Beach for the third Johns Hopkins Annual Music Festival (JAM), I honestly didn’t know who they were. By no means is that an insult to their stardom. If you ask anyone who’s done karaoke with me, they’ll tell you I have really basic taste in music.

I have never personally been a fan of Ariana Grande, with her sickly-sweet pop sounds not appealing to my rock-loving roots. Her highly publicized romantic life with Pete Davidson pushed me further away. That being said, Sweetener, Grande’s newest album released on Aug. 17, changed my mind.

Over the summer, a lot of music was released to little or no fanfare. The summer is usually when huge, blockbuster music is at the forefront, so the smaller, more unique projects get sidelined. Here are some of my favorite more underground projects from the past summer that you may not have heard.

No one could say for even a moment that Crazy Rich Asians does not deliver on its title, despite our Uber driver telling me at length about how all he could think of was Crazy, Stupid, Love. when he heard the name of the movie we were on our way to see (which hadn’t crossed my mind until that moment).

When the trailer for Netflix’s Insatiable was released back in July, it immediately garnered a large amount of controversy.
Upon re-watching the trailer, it’s easy to see why. The trailer seemed to make the claim that all of its protagonist’s problems could be solved following a miraculous weight loss.

After returning to Twitter in mid-April, Kanye West has been stirring up a lot of discussion among his fans and haters alike. This renewed interest in Kanye’s image culminated in a series of tweets in which he espoused his love for Donald Trump, tweeting, “We are both dragon energy. He is my brother,” and showing off his signed Make America Great Again hat. The public reaction was intense.

Studio North, a student-run organization designed to facilitate student filmmaking on campus, presented its 2018 Grand Premiere at the Parkway Theatre on Wednesday, April 25. The historic theater was packed with students, professors, families and community members eager to watch the work of student filmmakers who had received funding for their projects in the spring of 2017.

“It’s the end of the path I started us on.” Those are the words we hear Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) say to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in Avengers: Age of Ultron after Ultron and the Maximoff twins manage to defeat the team in their first encounter.

I’d like to preface this article by saying that I am an incredibly privileged person who was lucky to have the means and opportunity to pursue a college education. Many people do not get the same chances I got, and I realize that they might be happy to be in my position. But with that said, college was fucking miserable. Of course misery is relative, but I think I pretty much bottomed out around a half a dozen times over the last four years.

Witness Theater presented their spring showcase in Arellano Theater on Thursday, April 26, and Friday, April 27. The show, produced by junior Sarah Linton, featured five 10-minute student-written, student-directed plays.

I have long thought that Post Malone was underrated. His first song, “White Iverson,” blew up and he was almost universally considered a one hit wonder. But he kept making hits. He quickly built up a loyal fanbase. His first album — Stoney — was a great project. Each song on that album does something different and fun. Post found a way to do the thing that rappers had been trying to do for years: combine the country and rock aesthetic with hip hop.